Toby Segaran

Friend, fellow Foo camper, and now author Toby Segaran has just released his book Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications. My copy is now on order.

It's an overview of pretty much all the buzzword compliant algorithms and techniques available to your above average programmer. O'Reilly's pitching it as a solution manual to creating a Web 2.0 website and I think that's not quite the right take on the book. (But I have dumb opinions on Web 2.0 ) This book is probably the book you should turn to after you've built an excellent Web 2.0 site with huge volumes of user supplied community data and you want to mine it for all its value. It's not, however, going to help you put it in an Ajax widget and mash it up with the latest Yelp postings.

I can't review the book yet, because my copy's en route. But I can assure you Toby's the right guy to take on such a large topic and deliver on it in style and if your interested in figuring out how to go about handling the volumes of community data you've been building up. There's a chapter on search engines available on O'ReillyNet that's a pretty good indicator, I believe, of where this book is going. It takes you from a lame AltaVista-style search engine to learning, neural-net based search engine that will deliver you personalized results. Nice stuff.

I also appreciate that O'Reilly changed their cover format and put on a flock of penguins for this book.

Miranda July

Miranda July takes the role of Angelina Jolie in my circle of friends as the woman most likely to make other women leave their men.

So why is July so lonesome? No One Belongs Here More Than You really never hits any notes other than longing and so its been a bit of a slog to go through the never ending series of pretty, pithy and pathetic stories of unrequited love. Each one of these stories ranks up there in the better literature of the year but in general I have to say that I feel July needs to break out of her mold and try something new. Like inventing even cooler viral marketing campaigns.

Ken Kalfus

One of the advantages of going to fake graduate school is that I get a fair amount of time to read again. Especially so given the interesting status of the local mass transit solutions. The latest book I read is by Ken Kalfus. Ken Kalfus doesn't live in Brooklyn. Or even Berkeley. Ken Kalfus has lived in Paris, Moscow, Dublin, Belgrade and Philadelphia. But not Brooklyn. Which is the only reason I can think of for why you haven't heard of him. Which is a damn shame because you're missing something special.

Ken writes with a great capacity for understatement that's really quite refreshing in the day and age of David Foster Wallace (who is - no doubt - quite a treat himself). Ken's two anthologies Thirst and The Commissariat of Enlightenmentare some of hte best short stories I've read in ages, his new novel A Disorder Peculiar to the Country isn't quite up to these standards. But its still a wonderful piece of post-9/11 literature, almost as timely and accurate as Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

There are plenty of synopses around, so I won't burden you with that. DPTTC, like EL&IC, focuses on the irrationality of New York City, and by proxy, America during the year following the attacks on the World Trade Center. Characters respond to the incomprehensible loss of life with a numbness to the world around them, mindlessly hurting those around them with their narcissism and need for comfort. They also both are over-engineered around fairly obviously metaphors and symbolism but make up for it by daring to tap into emotional responses from readers. Where DPTTC breaks down is in the pacing. Kalfus will spend pages and pages on a a lovely party scene that breaks one of the characters out of his stupor just long enough to care about the feelings of another woman only to then resolve the entire book in just a few pages, eliminating all the emotional resonance from the story just as we've come to really understand how sad and forlorn our protagonists really are.

Read it. But read EL&IC first.